Demjanjuk Fires Chief Attorney; Defense Team’s Difficulties Cited

John Demjanjuk has fired the chief attorney defending him in an Israeli court against charges of brutalizing prisoners as a Nazi death camp guard, another lawyer for the retired Ohio auto worker said Friday.

Demjanjuk’s family decided to fire Buffalo, N.Y., lawyer Mark O’Connor because of the “long difficulties plaguing the defense team,” attorney John Gill said in a telephone interview from his home in Cleveland.

O’Connor has represented the 67-year-old Demjanjuk, from the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, for the past five years.

Phone Off Hook

The attorney could not be reached for comment Friday. The phone at O’Connor’s Jerusalem hotel room rang busy for an hour and a hotel attendant told reporters that he had probably taken it off the hook.

O’Connor’s dismissal came as he and his two associates, Gill and Israeli attorney Yoram Sheftel, were mapping the defense after five months of testimony by prosecution witnesses.

Demjanjuk is accused of being the sadistic “Ivan the Terrible,” who beat and mutilated prisoners before pushing them into the gas chambers in 1942 and 1943 at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He claims he is a victim of mistaken identity.

Handled Extradition Case

O’Connor also represented the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk in the trial leading to his extradition from the United States. Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 after a Cleveland federal judge ruled that he had lied to immigration officials about his wartime past when he applied for citizenship.

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Demjanjuk’s appeal to have his citizenship reinstated and deportations hearings began. At first, the Justice Department recommended that he be deported to the Soviet Union. Demjanjuk claimed he would face execution there.

Israel then sought his extradition to stand trial here for war crimes, and in 1985, a federal judge ordered it.

Gill said the dismissal letter, signed by Demjanjuk, was delivered to O’Connor on June 30.